A common and fast method of dressing a grinding wheel for e.g. grinding a raceway in a deep groove ball bearing is to use a rotating dressing roller with a peripheral profile corresponding to the profile of the raceway and to feed the dressing roller radially in relation to the grinding wheel into mutual contact during the dressing operation. Thereby the grinding wheel is given a profile which accurately conforms to the desired profile of the raceway.
One and the same dressing roller can in this case be used for one single raceway profile, and thus a plurality of different dressing rollers are necessary if rings with different raceway profiles are to be ground. Profiled dressing rollers are expensive and the method can be used in long series production, as the change of ring type requires change of dressing roller and thereby also a comparatively long adjustment time for the grinding machine.
In other connections, e.g. by German patent publication No. 1,281,885, it is known to make circular profiles on work pieces by letting tools with circular profiles perform arcuate translatory movements in relation to the work pieces. The tools in the known devices are, however, only usable for annular work pieces with a given diameter and can, therefore, not be used together with work pieces of different size. Furthermore, the double curved shape of the cutting surfaces of the tools is complicated as the profiles have different shapes in different parallel planes, which makes the tools complicated to manufacture.